TheNitai

I like to keep myself informed on different topics, as such RSS feeds are a great way to keep informed. They allow you to follow a site, without having to visit a specific website and scan for the latest articles. Moreover, it can keep you updated of software updates or news that would not enter your radar.

Over time, I have accumulated around 600 RSS feeds and the challenge to manage them all was a challenge in itself. Thought, today I have a very satisfying setup which I like to share.

The old workhorse

In the past I would go nowhere without NetNewswire. I’ve been a huge follower of NetNewswire for a long time. I can’t remember the companies name of the past, but it was one guy doing the whole work and the application was great. Then he sold it do Newsgator and they had this very great setup with their online RSS client which would sync the read statuses with the desktop client. Furthermore, they also had a iPhone client. All in all a winning team.

After some time, they gave up this setup and recommended all their customers to use Google Reader and use NetNewswire, both on the desktop and on the iPhone, to sync with Google Reader. Thought, I did not like Google Reader at first I have to say that i use Google Reader as my main “RSS server” nowadays.

Unfortunately, or let’s say fortunately, the move from the Newsgator platform to Google Reader has also brought new opportunities and ways in my RSS reading workflow, I would have never experienced with NetNewswire alone.

This brings me to my current setup.

The new workhorse

Today, I have replaced NetNewswire on my iPhone with Newsrack (it used to be called Newsstand). Newsrack is a full featured RSS reader, displays your news in a news stand like display (I don’t use it and simply like the “standard” view) and it is blazing fast in loading the feeds.

The big plus, apart from syncing with Google Reader is the ability to share the feeds by eMail, with my Google Reader followers, post it to Twitter, Delicious or Instapaper.

Sure, Newsrack itself is not a free app, unlike NetNewswire, but for my taste NetNewswire just did not scope it anymore for me. It did not sync properly anymore, the displaying of ads bothered me after some time, but apart from that, it was just painfully slow in syncing with Google Reader.

All in all, I’ve been buying Newsrack after around 2 hours playing with it and never regret it in any way.

I’ve looked into other RSS readers that have the option to sync with Google Reader, but could not find one that would work well for me. Especially the sharing feature and the way it works, just does it for me.

On to the Mac Desktop.

One might wonder why I would want to use a desktop RSS reader if Google has made Google Reader so easy to use in the browser and especially with Google Chrome the reader is just plain fast. Still, for me, desktop apps have benefits over their web counterparts. Some of the benefits are the possibility to read the feeds offline, be able to easily drag and drop them to an email client and post to a blog with MarsEdit.

So far, I have used NetNewswire also for Google Reader replacement, but here also, I experienced slow syncing and the ads really were annoying. Thus I set out on my quest for a replacement. Foremost, I did *not* want an AIR application (don’t get me started on AIR’s RAM usage). Luckily, it did not last long until I found the perfect Mac desktop Google Reader. Enter Gruml…

Gruml is a pretty young project (Version 0.9.17) and (surprise?) comes from a person in Germany. But what really got me hooked on Gruml is the usability that just makes it so much fun to use. Also, for just about every action you have shortcuts. Want to post a article to Twitter? Hit shift+T, Want to spread the news with ping.fm? Hit shift+G. Best of it, it opens a new tab with the build in browser.

But one of the really neat feature is the icon in the menu bar of MacOS X itself. First it lets you now how many unread items you got and when you click on the icon it gives you a preview of the feeds in its own window. Me thinks, that is really slick!

Moreover, I have found that Gruml is really in sync with Google Reader all the time. In my testing I saw that it syncs almost instantly with Google Reader and as such you have Google Reader, Newsrack on the iPhone and Gruml in sync almost by the beat.

Of course, one of the best selling points for Gruml is the price -  free by the means of Gratis, pay nothing, enjoy and follow the feeds

SugarCRM is a good open source CRM, but the overwhelming functions and navigation makes it “sometimes” hard to really get to the one thing you want to do. In any case, it does the job well. Apart from that, I just came upon this error message within SugarCRM:

Warnings: Inbound Email cannot function without the IMAP c-client libraries enabled/compiled with the PHP module. Please contact your administrator to resolve this issue.

This definitely means that PHP is missing some mail libraries, but the message to compile PHP is kinda scary, isn’t it? Luckily, if you are using Ubuntu all you need to do is to issue an “apt-get” command and you are rolling. So here we go:

apt-get install php5-imap

This will install everything for you, make sure to restart PHP (restart Apache or the FastCGI).

The other day I posted about “Exchange, Kerio, Zimbra and Google or the Quest for the perfect Collaboration Tool“. In that post, one of the main goals was how to keep all your eMails & Calendar entries up to date on different devices. Today, I want to share my experience with Google Apps (eMail & Calendar), the iPhone and my MacBook Pro and keeping all of them in sync.

Let’s start with Google. Google has this great service called Google Apps. When you sign up with Google Apps you not only get a (almost perfect) eMail service, Calendar and Contact manager, but you also get Google Docs, Google Video and Google Sites. Google Apps allows you to use your own domain, meaning you won’t have a eMail address of “mail@gmail.com”, but instead you can have your very own “mail@mydomain.com”. Best of it all, it is free of charge, that is up to 50 email accounts with each 7GB limit. If you want more you can sign up for Google Apps professional which gives you for $50 for each user/year, that’s an almost unlimited edition.

Now, back on your Mac it is easy to use the Google Mail service within your favorite Mail application, be it Entourage or Apple Mail. But in order to be able to use Google Mail as a POP or IMAP service you will need to enable it first in your Google account. For that simply go to your “Settings” and under “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” enable/disable the POP and/or IMAP settings.

After you have done that you can access your Google Mail account with your client. Many clients are supported. To get a current list of supported client visit their Help Center. Also make sure you follow the Guidelines for using your Mail client with Google Mail.

Now on your iPhone you can add the Google Mail account as well. One very important note on iPhone and Google is that you should NOT use the “GMail” button when you set up the eMail account on your iPhone if you want to use IMAP. The “GMail” button uses POP and not IMAP. Detailed instructions on how to setup your iPhone with Google is here.

I have found that using Google Mail with Apple Mail and iPhone is quite reliable and fast. Some things are different then with other mail servers, also somethings don’t work as expected. Those are;

1. You get a folder called [GMail] in your account. There are many places on the net describing what this folder is.
2. Actions on your messages are handled different with Google Mail. Google put up a document on these IMAP Mail actions here.
3. Google Mail does not the concept of folders. Every message gets a label. This might be a paradigm shift for some users.
4. Within Apple Mail I see that the read cound on my “InBox” is different then the one on the “All Mail” mailbox. After you wait for some time, sometimes up to 10 minutes, the read count gets synced.
5. The “Trash” folder has a unread mail count on it, even thought that those messages have been read.

All in all, keeping your mails in sync is not a hard thing to do as IMAP has become quite the “standard” and each mobile device has a decent eMail application available.

Calendar & Address Book Syncing

Recently, Google released, in Beta of course, the Google Sync for iPhone option. With Google Sync you can syncronize your Calendar & Address book with your Google account and your iPhone. Thought the idea is good there are two main flaws with Google Sync;

1. All your Calendar & Contacts entries are deleted on the first run (thought this is more a problem of the ActiveSync protocol then Google’s fault)
2. You will need a iPhone for Googly Sync and of course only the iPhone and the Google Apps are syncronized.

So, what to do if you want to sync your local Mac, your iPhone and your Google Apps?

For your iPhone you simply follow the instructions for the iPhone as outlined by Google. In short, you setup a Exchange Account, but don’t sync mail, only Calendar and Contacts.

For your local Mac, there is SpanningSync. With SpanningSync you simply enter your GMail account and your Mac, iPhone and Google Apps will stay syncronized all the time. SpanningSync is installed on your Mac and runs in the background. There are a couple of options on how and when to sync, but all in all, the application simply works. The application is based on an annual payment of $25 or a one time fee of $65. Thought, you can save $5 on SpanningSync with my discount code now.

Here you go. You got a perfect work flow system where all your Mail, Calendar and Contact entries are in sync with your iPhone, your Mac and Google.

One of my main goals in my everyday work flow is to keep all my informations at one central location and have access to them from everywhere. Meaning I want all my emails, contacts and calendar entries in sync, whether I use my mobile phone, my own laptop or I have to get to my data in the Maldives.

In this post I will try to share my experiences with each platform and how it fit my personal work flow. As a consultant I have deployed some of these in companies as well. Wherever possible I will try to touch the company advantages of it.

Exchange Server 2003/2007

Let’s start with the most popular Collaboration platform of it all. Exchange has been around for a long time and has matured from a “very hard to configure” system to a “wow, that was easy”, “Wizard driven” experience. I can remember setting up my first Exchange Server, swearing for 3 weeks and then reformat the whole server to start all over again. Thus when I installed Exchange Server 2003 about 2 years ago, it was a pleasant surprise.

Of course, MS still thinks it has to invent its own protocols and “forces” users to use them, as such that “normal” mail server functions like POP3 and IMAP are not enabled by default on Exchange 2003 and eMail addresses take a internal Domain format rather then the standard DNS system format. But once you pass those hurdles and configure your system to your likings, enabled MobileSync, finished configuring SharePoint, set access permission and so on, I have to say that Exchange Server 2003 is a very good collaboration platform.

Web Access over their OWA platform looks very good (at least on Windows with Internet Explorer) for FireFox or MacOS users the experience is somehow, let’s say, ok. After all, their main client is Outlook or Entourage and both perform very well. Calendar and contacts are synced instantly and there is nothing else to do then simply use it. Since SP2 push email syncing for mobile devices (Windows Mobile) is built in. To be honest, the Exchange Server platform has a lot going for it and it is therefore no wonder why so many companies use it.

Kerio MailServer

Since Exchange Server is only available on the Windows operating system, the team from Kerio MailServer tries to fill the void for all those MacOS X and Linux system admins that are in need for a Collaboration platform. Kerio features almost the same as the Exchange offering as it has Calendar, Contacts and of course eMail functions built in.

Especially, the web interface for the end user of the Kerio MailServer, is one of the bests I have ever seen. These guys, had a intuitive web interface 3 years ago when AJAX was still know as a washing cream (here in Europe) and not some sort of geek term.

I have personally, used Kerio MailServer within my company for the last 3 years. But to be honest, their take to syncing a  Calendar and contacts has been mediocre in the past. Somehow, it never really worked or was a clutch from an end user point of view. But in recent times, they have done their home work and their Connectors, small applications that you need to install for being apply to sync Outlook and/or Apple Mail, iCal and AddressBook or Entourage, have matured a lot.

Last but not least, their Administration client (yes another client), must be the best there is to manage a mail server. Also, the built in Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus functions are impressive. In our use of Kerio MailServer we caught Spam message down to about 1% per mailbox.

The only grips I have with them is that their pricing is quite high, compared to the Exchange Server or the other platforms described here. Plus, their support for mobile devices is somehow limited (but more to that further down in this post).

Zimbra

Now, being myself a open source fan (I mean we publish software under open source licenses ourselves) I have/had high hopes for the Zimbra Collaboration Platform. Since I wanted to deploy the server on our own servers I downloaded the available Open Source Edition. In it’s true Linux fashion you will have to start a script to install Zimbra.

I was pleasantly surprised how well thought out the installer script was. It asked me the most relevant questions, checked that I had all required libraries installed (yum is your friend here) and presented me with every step of the installation process. In the end, all I had to to was to change the password for the admin account and Zimbra was installed.

The experience with Zimbra is that everything is within your browser. The administration takes place within your favorite browser (something that Kerio should have done) and feels very mature. Personally, I have missed the advanced spam filter and Anti-Virus settings that Kerio features, but after all, Zimbra comes with a lot of functions out of the box.

I am also very impressed by their Zimbra Desktop product. The application serves well as a replacement for Outlook and Apple Mail. It bundles Mail, Contacts and Calendar in one application, one convenient view and takes the approach of GTD (Getting Things Done) more then any other platform.

In my testing I have had no problems with syncing my iCal Calendar to the Zimbra server. Events created within Zimbra (Web or Desktop) were pushed down to iCal within seconds. But what is really bothering me with Zimbra, is that they take the approach of giving a half backed Open Source solution to the community. Such that key pieces, such as the Apple Sync application (to be able to sync your contacts too) and other key applications (MAPI for Outlook users) are only available to paid “professional” Zimbra customers.

While I don’t have a problem to pay for products, especially open source products, the price of a Zimbra professional Edition for 25 mailboxes, Mobile Access and 3 Support Incidents for $1875/year seamed to be a bit way too much. I mean, I only want to have the option to sync my Calendar and Contacts with my own installation, on our own network, on our own servers!

So far, Exchange Server, especially the SBS (Small Business Server Edition) is still the most affordable platform. That is, until…

Here comes Google

I have to admit, I have not been a Google fan in the past. Whenever possible I tried to avoid any of their products, be it Desktop Search, their web search portal, Google Earth or anything. But I have had to rethink my attitude towards their Google eMail Service when I learned to use it more and seeing how it matured over the past.

Today, I have to say, the “Google Experience” and what they offer for companies is quite amazing. And I am not talking about the feature set of Calendar, Contacts or eMail, I am talking about that any business can move their whole eMail infrastructure to Google and all that for free!

You can pass your mail domain to Google and eMail over the gmail.com domain with your own domain name. No one will ever notice that you are using Google. Their Standard Edition gives you 50 mailboxes with each 7GB space. Each user gets their own contact list and Calendars. You can start sharing Calendars, invite others for a meeting and collaborate on Documents, just like with SharePoint.

It is no secret that their web client is one of the most liked and that some people have even started to only use their browser as their eMail client. While I am also all for browser based applications, I still like to use a dedicated eMail client for my day to day usage. Thus it is a pleasure to see that Google covers using Apple Mail, iCal and Contacts and Outlook with GMail.

To be able to sync your Calendar and Contacts with the Google platform you will have to use 3rd party applications. That is on Outlook I have found KiGoo to be very useful. KiGoo allows you to sync your (multiple) Calendar(s) and Contacts right within your Outllok application. There is nothing else then to set and forget. For only $9.95/year you can’t ask for more then that. On the MacOS X side I could only find one solution that worked for me, that is SpanningSync. SpanningSync is a System Preference that allows you to configure what to sync and in what time frame and it will sync your Calendar and Contacts to the Google platform with ease. The only thing drawback of SpanningSync is the strange yearly license of $25 or a one time license fee of $65. For my taste a bit on the expensive side, but it does what it says.

Mobile Phone Access

Today, more then ever, people “work” on their mobile devices. As I mentioned in the beginning, a Collaboration platform is only complete if I have a full circle of access, that not only means to have a web interface, a nice desktop client, but also access and syncing with my mobile device. So, let’s see how those platforms hold up for mobile syncing.

Exchange Server

As of Exchange Server SP2, users with a Windows Mobile device, can sync to their Exchange Server without any additional software or license. Contacts, Calendar and eMail is being kept in sync and from my experience works painlessly. In the last 2 years I used a BlackBerry device and we run our own BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) with a Exchange Server. All in all, a satisfying experience that I can only recommend. That is, if you have the IT staff to set it all up and maintain it. The same goes with the famous iPhone. Since Apple released the AtiveSync in their 2.x update for the iPhone, keeping in sync with the iPhone is a breeze as well.

Kerio MailServer

The Kerio MailServer licensed the ActiveSync protocol from MS and thus once could say that any device that is labeled to be working with Exchange Server will work with the Kerio MailServer as well. Make sure, you look up if your device will be supported. BlackBeery users wll need to adopt a third party vendor to be able to sync their devices. I have tested NotifyLink in the past and was disapointed to see that the BlackBerry Chat feature was/is not supported. Users who want to sync their iPhone need to know that the current Kerio version (6.6.2) does not support attachment and HTML eMails.

Zimbra

As already mentioned above, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite has a lot going for it, but the “you need to be a paid customer” mantra continous on when it comes to the Mobile device support. You will need to have a paying Zimbra Collaboration Suite in order to install the “Zimbra Mobile” service and some of their Mobile applications are again only available for paid users. Apart from that, their offering for Mobile Devices support is broad. You have BlackBerry Connector (Beta), Java applications for Java enabled phones and of course the ability to use the iPhone with the ActiveSync and IMAP combo.

Google

Again, Google is taking it all a bit further and is offering the broadest support for almost any mobile device for free. There are addons for BlackBerry devices, iPhone, Android phones Windows Mobile phones and more. Recently, Google released Google Sync for Mobile which is available for most mobile phones. On iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices Google Sync enables over-the-air synchronization of Google Calendar and Google Contacts to the built-in Calendar and Address Book applications on your phone. On most other mobile phones, Google Sync enables wireless synchronization of Google Contacts to the built-in Address Book application.

Final words and a recommendation

Of course, a proper recommendation alsways takes into account the circumstanes of the requirements of the company or the people involved in a Collaboration Suite. But given the current offerings and my experience with all of the above platforms I would give the following “list”:

1. Google
2. Exchange Server
3. Kerio MailServer
4. Zimbra

Why Google? Honestly, you can not beat the offering from Google. The availability, the feature set, the free services, the available mobile connections, the working syncing of Calendar and Contacts and the price (standard is free for 50 accounts with each 7GB storage) makes Google a serious application provider for any business or semi-professional user.

In the last weeks I have started to adopt to the “Get Things Done” approach for eMail management. See, I (used) to have 3 eMails accounts (nothing spectacular for most people) but had over 20000 messages in sub folders based on projects, dates, customers and so on.

My task was to reduce the amount on “noise” in my eMail application and create a system that is more “action based”. In other words, to open the eMail application should not be a torture anymore.

A change of mind is needed

Content can be stored in a couple of different ways. But the most common is probably the way to create folders and sub folders and collect informations within them. If you are one of those individuals who are keen to keep it neat and tidy you most likely have a order of projects and dates.

This is a mindset that we have, trying to keep control of the information. Because of this mindset, an application like Windows Explorer, or in its earlier incarnation the Norton Commander, were born. These applications allowed you to explore your folder structure in a structured way. One that we are used to, but frankly, not the most efficient way to find your stored data.

Luckily, smart people thought about this lack of efficiency and brought us Desktop Search Engines (there are many such apps available for Windows) and Spotlight (the built in search engine of MacOS X). These search engines allow us to find informations on our local or network drives in a more intuitive way.

The use of such a search pattern is totally accepted on the Web (think Google) and somehow (thought I still know a lot of people that don’t even know about a desktop search engine) on the local machines. But, for eMail management (yes, we have to call it management since you have to manage your email and not vice versa) we are still in the stone age! I know people that have all their eMails in the InBox, that is all their 6000 something mails! The other extreme is to have 30 or more folders with even more sub folders.

Let’s see how we can start managing eMail and take a “action based” approach to eMail Management.

Focus on the things that really matter

It’s all about to cut trough the chase and see what really is important. In order to achieve this, the approach you can take is to start separating eMails. This approach is also know when you come up to a challenge. How to solve a challenge in a most efficient way is to take a piece of paper and write down the pro and cons and the steps to resolve it. Likely, you will see that the challenge you are facing is not half the size you thought it is when written in words.

You can take this experience into your eMail behavior as well. With each eMail that comes in you should decide what action you have to take for this eMail. Here are the actions I have found in my workflow;

1. Needs a response.
2. I need to act upon it and then reply.
3. After a reply I have to wait for an answer.
4. I need to keep this eMail for future reference (archive it).
5. Delete it.

With the above workflow I can create 4 (5) folders named “Response”, “Act”, “Waiting”, “Archive” and the fifth folder, which exists already, the “Trash”.

Now, to move the eMails to their Action-Folders is only half the way to a successful eMail management. The other part of a successful action based approach is to tag, flag and mark the message in order to find them quickly on common and natural behaviors. As an example, instead of having a folder called “Projects” and a sub folder called “Press Releases” you could flag the message with “project, press release”. You would then move it to a general “Archive” folder and would find it with a search text of “project” and/or “press”.

As you can clearly see you just cut your endeavor to find the related message in half. No wading trough folders in order to find the right one and then the message(s) within that. The approach that is being outlined here is based on keywords and tagging of a message.

If you are on MacOS X and use the Apple Mail application you will need to use MailTags. MailTags is a plug in that allows you to set keywords, projects, notes, events and to dos on each message in order to act upon it. It is a fundamental piece in achieving a GTD workflow. If you want know more about MailTags I suggest you watch this introduction video on it.

As with everything, you will need to work with this “new” pattern for a while to see the impact of it. The most obvious effect is that you will find your InBox to be clutter free and the peace of mind sets in. This is the state, where you will start to be more productive.

There are many sites on the web that explains the approach of GTD (Getting Things Done) in a more elaborate manner. This article named “A primer on getting things done” is a good entry point for getting to know GTD and then of course the famous InBox Zero articles by Merlin Mann.